Nine of the best cheap games to play this Christmas

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. And by wonderful, of course, we mean expensive. Enjoy the cranberry sauce, the camembert wheels and the mini samosas now, because come January they’ll have become the base of the thin gruel you’ll be reheating endlessly to stave off death. Not to worry, though - these games are going cheap.

TG’s rounded up some bargains on PC, PS5 and Xbox to occupy your time in that golden Christmas week where you genuinely lose track of what day it is and start to worry about contracting gout. For many of us it’s the only chance we get to play games for extended periods, so we’ve plucked out the plumpest Christmas deals for your delectation.

PS5

GTA V - £17.99

It’s possible you’ve heard of this one. Play a trio of amoral and heavily armed, er, entrepreneurs in a walk-in parody of Los Angeles, taking downtime from bank heists to practise yoga and get some underfloor neons installed on your car.

Not only do you get one of the all-time great open-world single-player games for less than £20, you also get GTA Online. It’s like GTA, except it’s online. A whole city full of amoral and heavily armed contemporaries to make friends with. What wholesome fun.

Batman: Arkham Knight - £15.99

Listen, you get to be Batman. You get to fly around, land impressively on the streets and watch your cape flap about cinematically. And you can drive the Batmobile. In fact, it’s something of a secondary protagonist in Rocksteady’s third Arkham game, serving as a puzzle solving doohickey and a means of calling in the big guns when impossibly fluid, showoff-y martial arts just won’t do the job.

It’s been out a while now, originally releasing in 2015, but it’s aging better than Rob Lowe. Whack it on your OLED and marvel at a game that looks like it came out yesterday.

Gang Beasts - £15.99

This is the perfect game for silencing sullen young relatives who’ve been mercilessly thrashing you at FC24 all week. Load up Gang Beasts, a four-player couch co-op brawler, and vent all that pent-up rage by chucking them off a moving lorry. It’s alright though because the colours are bright and cheerful, so it’s funny. Not violent.

You watch this game being played for 30 seconds and you understand enough to play it, even if you never play games. And that’s a beautiful thing, bringing people together to enjoy a group activity this festive season. Even if the activity is picking up your auntie and throwing her into a giant furnace. More brandy, anyone?

Xbox Series X/S

Fallout: New Vegas - £8.39

Christmas games are a genre unto themselves. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes a great Christmas game, but Fallout: New Vegas inarguably holds all the core attributes.

It’s a long, deep, richly detailed RPG. The kind of game you enjoy over three-hour sessions at a time, and that’s a big part of what makes it right for the yuletide break. Obsidian took Fallout 3’s endless brown wasteland and super-satisfying VATS combat system, and built an all-new story around it where every single character you meet seems to have something absolutely fascinating and world-enriching to say. And one of those characters, Benny, is voiced by the late great Matthew Perry. Need we say more?

Valheim - £15.49

A Viking-flavoured open world where you and your mates build a settlement, slay mythical beasts and get really, really into smelting copper. Valheim’s Minecraft-like pliability, ‘90s era visuals and distinctive nordic landscapes make it a real time sink. And right now, for once, time is what you have.

It’s also a great hangout space. You can spend hours doing nothing in particular, you and some friends. Just chatting away while one of you builds a slightly more impressive roof over your shared house and another’s on the wiki, figuring out how to summon the next boss. It may still be in Early Access, but it’s already got many hours of Scandi kicks on offer.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag - £15.99

A game that lets you not only be an assassin but a ship’s captain, sea shanty virtuoso and a mighty pirate? Frankly, that rerun of the 1996 Only Fools and Horses Christmas special can do one, you’re in in AssCreed IV for the long haul.

This was the moment the Assassin’s Creed franchise realised that it was an RPG, and that RPGs are most interesting when they give you a good role to play. Out with the tedious tailing missions, in with the galleons and cutlasses.

Steam

Hotline Miami - £8.50

What if Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive had released not as a movie in 2011, but a Megadrive cartridge in the early ‘90s? We don’t need to imagine. Hotline Miami fulfils that role perfectly, marrying 16-bit ultraviolence to pastel shades and cool synthwave beats and making all the other games look like absolute squares.

It’s nasty. Truly unpleasant, in a way that gets under your skin. You’re a hired killer, turning up and killing buildings full of goons in incredibly gruesome fashion. It’s also troublingly good fun. Maybe one for when the kids have gone to bed.

Vampire Survivors - £3.99

One of the most popular indie games of the last couple of years, for roughly the same price as heating your home for 1 nanosecond. We’d call that a decent deal.

Vampire Survivors’ great strength lies in its simplicity. You pick a character and then you walk about on a 2D plane, absolutely leathering an unending tide of enemies, picking up power ups that make the screen get even busier, and then take a breather to let your eyes recover. Incredibly intense, compulsive one-more-turnery for less than a fiver.

Moonlighter - £15.49

By day, you’re a humble shop assistant. Basically an NPC, by traditional RPG standards, setting the prices of your goods and helping adventurers tool up for all the exciting quests they’ll be going on outside the walls of your safe, boring shop.

By night, you’re the adventurer. Well, all that stuff you sell has to come from somewhere.

There’s such a simple and engaging little twist at the heart of Moonlighter, a day-night cycle that sets your mind racing with future plans and compels you deeper into its roguelike dungeons whenever you get the chance. The retro 2D visuals are so wholesome, they’re positively therapeutic. A great de-stresser after what’s very likely been a bit of a year. Load it up, crack open another selection box you’ve nicked off your young cousin, and enjoy.